Monthly Archives: August 2015

In 2005, Daiei’s phenomenal Yokai franchise from the 1960’s enjoyed a brief, regrettable resurgence when famed director Takashi Miike decided to bless the Earth with The Great Yokai War. This unfortunate semi-sequel really only checks off on about half of the things that SHOULD be on the checklist for any Yokai film, and instead injects it with more Miike-isms than were desirable, or appropriate. I’m pretty hot and cold on Miike as a director to begin with, but in the case of The Great Yokai War, I’m straight up irritated.

Worth mentioning; this shit is a kid’s movie, but Miike isn’t the sort of bro you let babysit. The Great Yokai War is way, way scarier than your average children’s film, and periodically, it’s more sexually suggestive, as well. For the adults in the audience, I guess this is SORT OF a win, but it doesn’t really go far enough with the spooks or the sex to satisfy the shameful smut-hounds inside all of us, and I’m damn sure not going to let my kids watch this thing; so in the end we have a movie which lingers pointlessly between two polar opposite demographics. Honestly, that’s Miike to a T.

THE PLOT~ When an evil, ancient sorcerer type dude who dresses really nice decides that he wants revenge against both humans, AND the yokai, he does some stupid bullshit that’s super uninteresting and lame. Then, later on, some little kid finds himself wrapped up in a grand, cookie-cutter fantasy adventure, which forces him to battle alongside the Yokai and save the world. Holy shit, man it’s JUST that boring and generic.

UGH.

So… What, if anything, is GOOD in The Great Yokai War…?

Well, it’s does have a ton of monsters in it, which is definitely a non-negotiable requirementfor this franchise. Not providing this most bare-bones of requirements would be nothing less than inexcusable, and while Miike is ordinarily quick to disappoint/and/or blatantly defy expectations, I am happy to report that in this case, he does indeed bring the thunder, monster style. Thank heavens.

The monsters also LOOK pretty darn good… Well, the Yokai do, at least. They’re mostly live action, and that’s a straight up blessing. The film also has “bad-guy” monsters in it, which are all CG… They fucking suck so bad, but we’ll cover them in greater detail later.

The Great Yokai War also succeeds pretty admirably at replicating the fun vibe seen in Spook Warfare, we get a real feel of urgency, and the human and yokai worlds are intermixed in a way that feels very similar to what the earlier Daiei films did so well. I’d say Miike passes with flying colors in this arena (imagine that!). He also nails the characterization of most of the central cast (with the exception of the bad guys- again, more to come on this), who feel like real, fully developed personalities, full of flaws and peculiar traits which make them feel relatable. Some of the jokes are even funny, the Yokai are all pokey and selfish, unmotivated to do anything even when oblivion is starring them in the face, and the only way to successfully get them to march off to battle is by misleading them into thinking they’ve been invited to a party. It’s weird, but I almost want to throw Miike a thumbs up in regards to how well this is done… But then I remember Ichi The Killer, and I get pissed off again.

Possibly the best thing the movie does, though, is that it actually has a fairly intelectual thesis statement, which is most unexpected in a shabby-ass kid’s fantasy adventure film. At the heart of it, The Great Yokai War is all about the transition from youth to adulthood, the moment when abandon our naïve, youthful perspective, and instead adopt of a more complex understanding of morality, and our roles in society. This is illustrated adequately in the personal journey of our central character, some Japanese Kid, and also mirrored more casually in the journey society has undertaken as it slowly forgets about the traditions of yesteryear, and becomes more preoccupied with the Internet and getting to work on time. As much as this movie full-on pisses me off, The Great Yokai War is ABOUT something, and credit where credit is due, that’s worth pointing out in any fair critique.

Not that that’s out of the way…

What DOESN’T work….?

The first (and worst) mistake Miike makes is that he takes the film out of the period setting seen in the old Daiei movies, and plops it down shittily into modern times. Damn, that sucks. This change allows Miike to flood our screen with his desired bad guys, who, again, are exempt from every single compliment I’ve paid to this film thus far, and it also sets up the comparison between the evolution of Japanese culture, and the journey to adulthood seen in our central character (some Japanese Kid), but it sucks like nobody’s business and isn’t worth it. It’s lame, lame as hell, this film would immediately jump up a full letter grade AT LEAST if it were set in Japan’s feudal era. It’s just so much more interesting.

Second inexcusable flaw: TheCG. ALL of the CG in this film is fucking horrible. It’s just appaling, and really, this is a very common complaint for most any Japanese film in this day and age. It’s actually impossible to look at these characters and not feel a profound distatisfaction with how freaking shitty they all look. It would be enough to ruin the film, if there was even a decent film to ruin, and so I propose a new rule; If you can’t accocmplish your end goal with digital effects that are at least passable, then tough cookies, dude, change your goals. Do NOT launch a project that you can’t realistically pull off and then chuck the dog shit results out into the cinematic community, expecting a pardon. The CG in The Great Yokai War is a hole that would sink any boat; Miike, may God have mercy on your soul, you should have done anything other than this.

THIRD INEXCUSABLE FLAW: The Bad Guys. All of the bad guys in this movie are completely terrible. Firstly, the evil sorcerer dude: his plan is to capture all of the yokai, round them up, and toss them into this miasmic flame he’s got in a furnace (this is actually a yokai as well, oddly enough. It looks like slimy, pink fire.). After that, he tosses garbage in with them, and let’s it all mix together, thereby transforming the yokai into stupid looking steampunk robots that carry out his evil bidding. Re-read that, basically, this guy’s evil scheme is exactly the same thing Dr. Robotnik did back in the Sonic The Hedgehog video games, Sega Genesis era. To be clear, I think that shit was more believable when it was 16 Bit. Also, it had better graphics.

Shitty robots aside, the bad guys are also saddled with those familiar and all too unwelcome anime tropes, which have slowly wormed their way into Japanese live action cinema, and which really are just the worst things ever. His main henchman is easily the most aggravatingly lame character in the entire film, she’s some turncoat Yokai, played by the often obnoxious Chiaki Kuriyama. Sorry, Chiaki, if I hated you in Kill Bill, I’ll probably hate you forever.

If you were wondering who the second lamest character in the film is, it’s probably Sunekosuri, a little fury creature who forms a special friendship with our lead kid early on. Sunekosuri is basically just a B-squad Mogwai that pees a lot. It sucks.

FORTH INEXCUSABLE FLAW: HOLY SHIT, THIS MOVIE IS GENERIC: It doesn’t help that Miike took these neat little movies that were essentially brilliant live action interpetations of Japan’s rich folk lore, and then made a sequel which mashed them into the most generic fantasy storyline ever. The Great Yokai War really feels like it’s less concerned with exploring folklore, and more concerned with being the Japanese Neverending Story. Really, It’s more like The Neverending Story part 5. Probably. I never saw Part 5, but if it exists, I’m sure it sucks, just like The Great Yokai War does.

The last two things I have to say:

1) One of these yokai looks like what you’d get if Mickey Rourke got wasted in a Hawaiin Punch bottling plant and lept into one of the vats.

2) This kid’s shirt says something about midget racing, I shit you not. What in the hell is going on in Japan!??!

The third entry in Daiei’s fantastically groovy Yokai trilogy rests on the far end of the spectrum from Spook Warfare; this time around we are given practically no insight into the yokai as individual personalities at all, and our narrative remains grounded solidly in the human realm, with our monsters popping in far less frequently than in the previous two films. Oddly enough, that means that we have the best story and the most engrossing characters of the entire trilogy, yet somehow, the movie still hits the finish line dead last insofar as entertainment value is concerned, because, really, Yokai is all about monsters per capita. Seems hardly fair, but thems the breaks, baby.

THE PLOT~ When some shady, gangster samurai intercept the delivery of some incriminating evidence, murder style, they also manage to inadvertently choose sacred ground as their primo ambush spot, thereby agitating the local yokai. The hoary old shrine keeper pleads with them to take the bloodshed elsewhere, but, predictably, he is ignored/murdered. Everything looks good for our samurai douchebags, until, that is, the yokai intervene, and place the evidence in the hands of the shrine keepers adorable grand-daughter. With Granddad dead and gangsters on her tail, our little heroine departs on a life and death quest to reach a nearby town where her deadbeat dad has been hiding out since her friggin’ birth, all the while deftly evading her murderous pursuers. But she is not alone; early in her quest, she meets a kindly young samurai who takes it upon himself to defend her, but of course , that’s easier said than done. Before the shows over, we have a few remarkably spooky altercations with the titular Yokai, as they deliver their traditional apparition-administered vigilante justice all up in the bad guy’s grills. It’s freaking rad, is what I’m saying.

Like all the Yokai films (100 Ghosts especially,) as well as Daiei’s also rad Daimajin, Along With Ghosts is, in fact, a samurai film with a strong paranormal element, but in this particular entry, the dial is cranked much further in the samurai direction than ever before. The spooky bits spice up the picture significantly, but they’re almost an afterthought, with minimal rewrites the movie could be told as a straight samurai flick without any ghost business at all. It also does a lot less filming on sound stages, instead many of our exterior shots have been moved to actual villages, open, sweeping fields, and other natural landscapes. There’s lot more moving camera now, due to our newfound wide-open space, and the end result is a more visually dynamic film. Additionally, the ghosts are no longer the least bit wacky, we don’t see a trace of our jive talkin’ Kappa or goofy Umbrella Ghost, and their replacements are pretty friggin’ terrifying. These hideous spooks are designed and implemented for horror, and horror alone. I do think the film could have benefitted from more time with them, but they’re sure effective as fuck when the picture does roll them out.

As I said before, despite the fact that from an academic perspective this film is actually much better than it’s predecessors, it’s still the least likable entry in the Yokai series, because the strength of these films lie almost exclusively in it’s many diverse monsters. In the case of Yokai, sacrificing a well executed narrative for a couple more ghosts is actually the way to go, as counter-intuitive as that may look on paper. Still, it’s no crisis, being the worst entry in the yokai trilogy remains nothing to sneeze at. All of these movies are rock solid. Along With Ghosts just happens to be the weakest in the bunch.

100 Ghosts is the strongest film in what is already a remarkably strong franchise, the Yokai Monsters series, three rad movies which were produced by Japan’s Daiei Studios in the late 1960’s. 100 Ghosts feels like a Japanese book of scary stories masquerading as a costume drama, but each of the individual tales are well integrated into the plot, so in the end it feels like a single, concise narrative, rather than an anthology film, like Creepshow, or Two Evil Eyes. Unlike Spook Warfare, 100 Ghosts keeps its narrative focused on the mortal plane, and dishes out the yokai in more modest doses. This time, the Yokai don’t really feel like characters, and they have no evident personalities. Instead, we see them more as supernatural agents of cosmic retribution; delivering justice to those who break society’s moral code, and this makes them infinitely more frightening than the squabbling, almost humorous depiction we got in Spook Warfare. Really, this movie actually gets pretty damn spooky toward the end, and much like Daimaijin, another Daiei studios film which is thematically similar to 100 Ghosts (And also shares much of the same cast), 100 Ghosts takes it’s time setting the scene before it hits us with a heavy dose of monster. The pay off in this film’s third act is well worth the wait.

THE PLOT~ When a group of thugs rides into a small village in rural Japan and commences to destroy the local shrine, the villagers find themselves understandably confused and distressed. It’s about to get worse, though, because this is just stage one of their shitty plan; and stage two is to follow up the besmirching of this religious site with the abrupt destruction of the local tenement house, a structure which much of our central cast calls home. Apparently his is all legal, too, due to a shady alliance between a local businessman and a super corrupt Lord, who is basically a damn gangster. Once everything is torn down and smashed, the bad guys are going to open up a cheap brothel and basically ruin everybody’s lives, so naturally our main characters wanna put the kybosh on this evil scheme like, ASAP. Along with the help of a wandering samurai, the villagers hatch a plot to save the day.

I know what you’re thinking… When you look at it, this sounds like the plot to the most generic 80’s teen movie of all time. It’s basically Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, only in Japan, with monsters. “Hey, gang, we gotta stop the evil billionaire from tearing down our rec-center and opening a strip mall! Let’s organize a concert to raise community awareness!” Yeah, pretty much that’s the exact plot of 100 Ghosts, but you don’t really notice that when you watch it, because this movie is awesome as hell, and also a lot of people die. Plus, in 100 Ghosts, our human characters aren’t even able to pull it off anyway, and the real solution ends up having nothing to do with them. Instead, it’s the yokai that save the day. Allow me to explain:

Having smashed the shrine to smithereens, our two bad guys decide to prematurely celebrate how awesome it is to be a big shit head with a night of recreational ghoul summoning. Sounds reasonable. They do so in the format of a rad party game called ‘The 100 Spirits ritual,’ which seems to be something like a group-friendly version of “Bloody Mary.” In order to conduct the 100 Spirits ritual, you must first gather a group of your friends and neighbors around a story teller, who then recites a series of cautionary ghost stories, which have all been handed down over the course of many centuries, or maybe just made up on the spot, depending on the credibility of the dude you hire. At the end of each story, a candle is lit (Or put out, I can’t remember. Don’t conduct this ritual at home.) Once all of the night’s stories have been told, and all the candles are lit, it is crucial that the storyteller conduct a “Curse elimination ritual“, because apparently just hearing these forbidden tales is enough to curse the shit out of you. Sounds like a pretty important part of the exchange to me, I would definitely want to take the extra time for the Curse Elimination Ritual, but our bad guys opt out. Having just sat through, like, 100 cautionary tales, they immediately prove that no amount of second-hand information is enough to teach them anything. Instead, they kick the story teller out, telling him not to let their sliding, paper door thing smack him in the side of the ass on the way out, and go on to chuckle turdishly about how ghosts are for losers and how neither of them are about to die terribly. Predictably, after this, the bad guys get the hell haunted out of them something fierce, which is super great to watch.

Like all of the Yokai movies, 100 Ghosts features a vast menagerie of ethereal Japanese bozo monsters, but none of them particularly hog the spotlight, except, of course, for the Umbrella Monster, which, just the very name of this thing is enough to raise an eyebrow. In all fairness, according to Yokai Attack; a nifty little book written by Hiroko Yoda (presumably of no relation to Jedi Master Yoda) and Matt Alt, the Umbrella Monster’s true name is Kara-Kasa, but holy shit, dude, who cares? Check this friggin’ thing out:

‘What’ indeed!

Pretty much, this particular monster doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot. It likes to sneak up and lick people, and it looks like the deranged little brother of that sexy lamp from A Christmas Story.

See the resemblance? Yokai are weird sometimes… Usually, even.

Like all of the Yokai films, even for the lousy ass one that Takashi Miike made in 2005, the greatest strength of 100 Ghosts is in just how many awesome, and unique, Japanese bogey men and women are crammed into the film’s brisk 90 minute run time, as well as the impeccable work by the art department in putting all of them together. Besides all the wonderful monsters, the set and costume design throughout the picture are also impeccable, and I’d say that 100 Ghosts really is Daiei at it’s best. All three Yokai films are legit gems, which remain puzzlingly under-appreciated stateside, and 100 Ghosts is easily the raddest of the batch. Go seek it out!

Possibly the coolest thing Daiei studios ever did was it’s Yokai Monsters trilogy, three impeccably awesome monster flicks which highlighted a group of wildly diverse and creative Japanese folks spirits, from within the format of a period costume drama. These films are satisfying, fun, effective, and they feature peerless Showa era art direction, as well as Suitomation work which far exceeded the craftsmanship seen in better known Daiei franchises, such as the Gamera or Daimajin films. Seriously, these movies are inexcusably under-appreciated outside of Japan, and if I do one thing in my life which is both effective AND NOT blatantly immoral, let it be that I spread awareness of rad shit to people who don’t care. Yokai Monsters– if you’re reading this, it’s too late, I have already won.

“But just what in the hell is a yokai?” You ask, your Caucasian features twisted into a confused, pained mask of fair skinned befuddlement. Well, good friends, don’t be embarrassed, it’s not out of line for we non-Japanese folks to have no clue just what in the fuck a Yokai is, but there’s good news: I’m here to help you.

You see, ‘Yokai’ is, from what I can tell, sort of an umbrella term, under which a general class of Japanese spirits, ghosts, and bogeymen are grouped. They’re similar to the Western concept of a ghost in its quasi intangible, immortal nature, but yokai aren’t necessarily the spirits of deceased human beings. There’s an incredible amount of diversity in the yokai community, one of these dudes appears to be nothing more than a long strip of sentient paper which flys around through the air. Another is an umbrella with one eye that likes to lick people. It’s kinda just a big, spooky, ghoul grab bag that contains an endless aray of total weirdos, but as freaky as these critters are, they’re also damn neat, and an absolute motion picture gold mine. All three of the Yokai films feature a wide range of these spirits, and that alone makes them a must-see for fans of Japanese horror cinema.

THE PLOT~ When a terrible, Ancient, Babylonian Demon called ‘Daimon’ is accidently freed by foolish grave robbers, it flies across the globe and settles in Fuedal Japan, for no reason. Daimon, eager to get back into the swing of evil bullshit, kills and impersonates a local Lord, and in so doing, evicts Kappa, a water dwelling Yokai which had lived on the Lord’s property, presumably forever. Kappa is pissed, and he goes to tell all the other Yokai that some big, gnarly, foreign spirit is busting up shit in Japan, and he needs their help to make it right. Initially, all the other Apparations call bullshit on Kappa’s story, because he’s sort of like the Dave Chappelle of the Yokai kingdom, but they eventually come around and agree to help him. In the end, all the yokai are gathered for a massive conflict between the indigenous spirits of Japan, and this monstrous intruder, who just can’t play nice.

Also, sometimes the Yokai use profanity, and we all know that’s awesome.

The subtext should be pretty clear; this is a Nationalist, Japanese, knee-jerk reaction against foriegners, the outside world, and Western Influence. It’s also very possible that it’s specifically a religious statement, that is to say, Spook Warfare could be read as a Shinto-Centric denouncement of Christianity, an imported religion which had begun to gain popularity throughout Japan. Daimon is a Babylonian demon, but we may have just swapped one Middle-Eastern faith for another, making him a thinly veiled stand-in for Christianity all the same. His behavior and characteristics are also very much in line with the traditional European vampire, and at the end of the film, he is chased off by figures which are forever associated with an indigenous religion of Japan, so the argument that this is a big “You’re not welcome” sign pointed right in the face of people who straight up dig Jesus feels pretty sound. At one point, Daimon even goes after the children, and that’s when the Yokai REALLY get pissed. This is essentially the Yokai film equivalent of finding out that a missionary gave a pocket Bible to your ten year old, so now you’re losing your shit because Richard Dawkins is your god and you don’t want any of that stuff in your house.

That having been said, it’s not really as over the top as it sounds, and it’s hardly just cause for rounding up the neighbors and burning copies of Spook Warfare in the center of your cul-de-sac. This is just a little bit of Nihonen Xenophobia, and that’s a perfectly natural reaction for a culture to have when it perceives its natural identity to be challenged. Cut Japan a break on this one, and hopefully, they’d do the same for you. You’d be missing out on a great film otherwise.

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare is great. All three of these films really straddle the line between monster movie and ghost story, they’re fun, imaginative, and feature some of the best costume, set, and prop design ever to come out of the Showa era. I couldn’t recommend them more.